Action Figures, Comics and Pop-Culture Podcast

Promotion

I have a passion for social media and the role it can play in marketing. I believe it can be a powerful and successful marketing tool, especially when it compliments traditional techniques. That is not to say that some social media campaigns can’t stand alone. One social media campaign that recently caught my eye was for the Firefly Music Festival held in Dover, Delaware a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately I was unable to attend the festival (looked like an amazing line up), but I did catch their twist on the Twitter scavenger hunt for free tickets. If you are not familiar with how a Twitter scavenger hunt works, it is pretty simple, in order to give away free promotional items, you hide said items out in public somewhere. Then you leave clues on where to find the promotional item on your Twitter feed. The first person to follow the clues and find the prize wins.

The promotional gurus for the Firefly Music Festival took the traditional Twitter scavenger hunt and added a nice twist. They paired it with Google Maps and a custom hashtag (#Firefly2013) for the festival. Then, instead of tweeting out the clues to the hidden tickets, they had followers tweet out the hashtag. How did one find out where the tickets were then? A special Google Map web page was set up (see it here) and the location would be shown on the map. However the map started zoomed all the way out, the more tweets they got with the hashtag, the closer they brought the map, until it was close enough to see where the tickets were hidden.

While past scavengers hunts I have seen get you Twitter followers, this version added a few results that I find quite beneficial.

Awareness and Promotion: For one, contestants had to visit a special web page (here); this web page is full of marketing and promotions for the concert and links to additional information. Secondly, users were tweeting out the hashtag so everyone in their networks was seeing it. Hundreds of people tweeting to hundreds of followers… do the math, that is a lot of people reading about Firefly Music Fest or at least seeing the hashtag.

Trending Topic: By having the participants tweet #Firefly2013 over and over, there is the potential to get the hashtag trending. It might be really tough to get it trending nationally, but could very easily start trending regionally. Regardless if it trends or not, the event hashtag is getting posted hundreds of times throughout the day.

Audience Engagement: With past Twitter scavenger hunts, the goal is to get a lot of additional followers and then send out a lot of posts to Twitter. With Firefly’s set up, you are getting your followers to do the posting, the organizers only needed to control the Google Map. The contest is tapping into user generated content and getting the users to push out the tweets for you.

I am always in favor of adding social media to your marketing mix. It can open up opportunities to be more creativity. Social media contests are on every format, and whether you are looking to get followers, shares, likes or to gather emails with yours, why not add an element that makes it stand out and creates additional return.